OF WA: 



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CAVE HUNTING 



IN 



YUCATAN 



A Lecture delivered before the Society of Arts of the Massachusetts 
Institute of Technology, on December 10, 1896 



By HENRY C. JVIERCER 

Curator of the Museum of /Imerican and Prehistoiic Archaeologj) at the 
Universitj/ of Pennsylvania 



Reprinted from the Technology Quarterly for December, i897, Vol. X, No. 4 



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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
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http://www.archive.org/details/cavehuntinginyucOOmerc 




Fig. I. AcTUN Ceh, Benado. [Cave of the Deer.) 

In the Sierra de Yucatan, about two and a half leagues westward from 
Opichen. The immense underground room, reached after a long clamber in the 
darkness, is lit from above through a skylight in the middle of its ceiling. The 
roots of alamo trees on the right hang downward from the brink of this lumm- 
ous chasm to the cave floor, from which remarkable stalagmitic forms, tinted by 
contact of light and air, rise on all sides. Several of the prominent surfaces 
have been inscribed by the ancient cave visitors with dots and circles suggestmg 
the human eyes, nose, and mouth, and the outlines of animals resembling deer. 



CAVE HUNTING IN YUCATAN. 



Introduction. 

Cave Hunting Explained. 

Two years ago the Corwith expedition of the University of Penn- 
sylvania (under the kind auspices of Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and named 
after its generous donor, Mr. John W. Corwith, of Chicago) set out at 
rather short notice to open, it seemed, a new field of archaeological 
research in Yucatan. We were going to hunt in caves for evidence 
of man's antiquity. 'We asked how long man had inhabited Yucatan, 
and under what circumstances he had first arrived there. Not that 
the question had not been asked before by Stephens, Waldeck, Char- 
nay, and other explorers, who had speculated upon the age of the ruins 
of Central America ; but we thought that we were possessed of a way 
of getting at the question that v/as quicker, surer, and more conclusive 
than theirs. We were going to test the antiquity of the man that built 
the wonderful ruins, and gauge his original state of culture, not by the 
ruins themselves, but by the traces of his presence left by him in 
caves ; and we were the more confident of success from the fact that 
the caves, abundant as they were in the region, had never before been 



354 Henry C. Mercer. 

searched. We were the first upon the field — the first to attempt to 
translate their hidden contents. 

But why search caves .-' Why go under ground } Why leave the 
daylight and all the beauty and wonder of the ruins to delve in damp, 
dark holes, where at most we proposed to find a few broken pieces of 
pottery, a few fragments of bone or chips of flint upon which the 
visitor at a museum might scarcely bestow a glance. 

On the answer to this question hangs the whole justification of our 
attempt, and that answer is, that science has shown that if you want 
to get to the bottom, to the beginning of the human story, you must 
hunt in a cave. Science has shown that most if not all primitive 
peoples, when confronted by caves which were accessible, light and 
dry, at some time or other entered them. When they did it has ap- 
peared that they built fires on their floors and scattered the bones of 
cooked animals near by, until caked deposits of rubbish were trodden 
down upon the foothold, and until these, when interbedded with bands 
of loam or leaves or stalagmite, proving intervals of time when the 
cave was vacant, presented us with a series of epoch-denoting layers 
resting upon the cave floor, one upon another, the oldest on the bottom 
and the latest on the top. Science has thus shown that before arti- 
ficial houses were built, man entered these natural houses prepared for 
him by an ancient geological process before his coming, and outlasting 
his day, and that there, where the rock walls and the limit of light and 
darkness compelled all cave visitors to inhabit the same area, the 
whole problem of sequence, of who came first and who came last, 
layer upon layer was buried at one spot. For these reasons a great 
number of caves were excavated in England, Belgium, France, and 
Germany, and a large amount of evidence collected, which over and 
over again repeated the same story. 

Where does the word prehistoric gain its significance } What sig- 
nifies this classification in ages and epochs of man's culture in the 
last fifty years .^ What justifies us in saying that during a series of 
millenniums before Herodotus and Pliny, before the dawn of history, 
man had bronze before he had iron ; that older than bronze was pol- 
ished stone ; and that older than polished stone was chipped stone ; 
that with bronze and polished stone man had domestic animals, but 
with chipped stone, none ; that during the bronze and polished stone 
time animals were recent, while during the older chipped stone epoch 
they were of species now extinct .■* Let it be said again, in answer to 



Cave Hunting in Yucatan. 355 

these questions, that nothing has so well established us in this new- 
knowledge, now not over fifty years old, as the investigation of layers 
in caves. 

No doubt that these cave layers are often missing. No doubt that 
they are often disturbed, and that there is often much confusion in the 
record ; but as far as Europe is concerned, that man was present and 
left his footprints in available caves, there can be no doubt. From the 
man of history to the man with bronze, from the man with bronze to 
the man with stone, from the recent man to the fossil man, as far as 
Europe is concerned, all have left their traces in caverns and rock 
shelters. Now, if science has shown this in Europe, what shall it 
show for America } When we come to look shall we find that the 
same rule of superposed epoch-denoting culture layers holds good 
here .? Can we dig down into the subterranean floors and find fossil 
man here as we found him there } These are questions which I began 
to ask four years ago, and am still asking, and all that I have yet to 
present is a narrative of how, in one way or another, I have found 
the evidence in American caves scanty and shallow, and of how up 
to date I have failed to find fossil man. 

What if we continue to fail to find him } What if we find that 
he does not exist anywhere in the caves of America t What if we go 
down the Ohio and Kanawha and Delaware and Susquehanna, as I have 
done for the last three years, preferring the great waterways and 
passes where savages would have crossed the Appalachian barrier from 
east to west, or west to east, and find 'that this earlier fossil savage, 
who should have been a contemporary of the extinct animals, is always 
missing t What if as against all the culture layers of Europe we here 
find only one — always find the Indian and nothing but the Indian, 
represented by a characteristic rubbish band composed of familiar 
arrowheads, potsherds, and bone needles on the floors of all these 
caves ; and what if beneath this in the ancient red or yellow cave earth 
v/e dig again and again to the mother rock, to find sometimes the 
bones of bats or rabbits, or the remains of snails, sometimes the ver- 
tebras of the great sloth, the teeth of the tapir, or the jaws of the 
mylodon or peccary, but never a trace of humanity } 

Such is the kind of evidence thus far gleaned by us from the 
American caves ; but before trying to draw a conclusion from it, it 
remains to be asked, have we gone far enough .? Have we searched 
enough caves to warrant us banishine: fossil man from the eastern 



356 Henry C. Mercer, 

region or setting a geological limit to human existence in the New 
World ? Have we investigated regions where we might expect to find 
man older than elsewhere ? And our expedition to Yucatan was a 
reply to this by pushing the research into a district where it seemed 
that man should have been old if he was old anywhere on the continent. 



Yucatan Promises to Solve the American Problem. 

Judged by the test of written language, the old inhabitants of Yuca- 
tan might reasonably be placed at the head of all the people found by 
Columbus in the New World. The Peruvians had qiiipns, tally-knots 
on thongs or strings, by which something previously learned by heart 
was suggested to the expert reader. The Mexicans had picture writ- 
ings more or less symbolic. But the Mayas whom the Spaniards 
found in Yucatan used hieroglyphics where a symbol comes to stand 
for the object, and the mind prepares itself to invent an alphabet. The 
Peruvians were master masons in the massiveness of long and high 
walls built of immense hewn blocks. The Mexicans were lofty mound 
builders, and the people of the Ohio valley constructors of such great 
and elaborate earthworks as you see at Marietta, or at that poetically 
beautiful fair ground at Newark ; but the carved palaces of the Mayas, 
overloaded with mysterious symbolism whose ruins still astonish the 
traveler in the forest of Yucatan, exceeded everything. We had a 
notion of a sort of civilization older than that of Mexico buried away in 
the wilderness, of something that even the Indians had themselves for- 
gotten when the Spaniards came, of something more ancient, more 
elaborate, more marvelous in Yucatan than anywhere else from Behring 
Straits to Patagonia ; and when we learned from Professor Heilprin 
that in the very midst of all these awe-inspiring ruins described by 
Stephens and Waldeck, by Charnay and Maler, there were abundant 
dry and spacious caverns which none of these travelers had explored, it 
seemed as if we had the question of man's antiquity in America pre- 
sented to us in a nutshell. There where man had reached the highest 
point of semi-civilization or barbarism in the new hemisphere, it 
seemed as if all the doubts as to his antiquity could once and for all 
be set at rest. If he was old anywhere he was old there. If the 
American problem could be settled anywhere it could be settled in 
Yucatan. 



Cave Hunting in Yucatan. 357 

The American Problem. 

But what is the American problem, and why settle it ? Has it not 
been settled before ? Do we not know how old the Indians are ? Have 
we not the Calaveras skull and pestles and mortars excavated from the 
bottom of gold mines? Have we not the Trenton "turtle backs" 
chipped by human hands and gathered from a bank of gravel on the 
Delaware River, which, by the last of the geological time estimates, 
should be about 32,000 years old? Dr. Koch's spear-heads, with mas- 
todon remains, chipped blades from the beds of fossil lakes, and a 
dozen other evidences of man's great antiquity — do they not prove 
that long before the Indian as we know him, we may look back into 
the geological past and behold humanity here as in Europe, a con- 
temporary of the mammoth and the mastodon, the saber-toothed tiger, 
and the fossil horse ? Let it be answered that in spite of all thus far 
presented on the subject, we are still in doubt if not darkness. Let 
him who supposes that all these things described and recapitulated in 
the introductions of recent text-books and histories are proved and 
settled, try to investigate them for himself. When he does he finds 
that what he had regarded as well-fixed facts fade away like stories of 
ghosts and haunted houses at near approach. He learns that while 
in Europe it is an easy matter for you or me to step upon a railway 
train and go to any one of a score of sites where human remains can 
be found at short notice with the bones of extinct animals, here, on 
the other hand, we may assert that no explorer will venture to lead us 
to-morrow or next week by a journey long or short (which some of us 
would willingly take) to any point whatsoever east of the Mississippi, 
where he can guarantee us a sight of fossil man or of one of his im- 
plements in place. As far as America is concerned, homo fossilis is 
desperately hard to find. 

This, then, is the problem of man's antiquity in America ; we do 
not know how long man was here. The red man was found here, but 
we have not yet accounted for him. Let alone the question of the 
Indian's predecessor if he had one, we do not know where the Indian 
came from. We cannot say whether his development of language, of 
architecture, and varying customs, whether his dissemination of maize, 
his apparent domestication of the dog and the llama, whether all this 
is an affair, geologically speaking, of modern times, or of a longer 
epoch ; of the time represented by the forest loam under our feet that 



35^ Hejiry C. Mercer. 

grows western wheat without manure, of the present existing plants 
and animals, and of the outlines of the country as we now know them, 
or of a time denoted by a race of animals that is extinct and measured, 
according to Spencer's late work at Niagara Falls, by a lapse of 32,000 
years. This is the question at the bottom of American archaeology. 
This is the question that we went to Yucatan to settle, and to settle 
by means of hunting in caves. 

Marvelous as were the ruins, interesting as were the Indians them- 
selves, the descendants of the builders of the ruins, we turned away 
from them to dig under ground, for there we ventured to believe that 
the truth might be demonstrated for the first time. Somewhere, very 
deep in the cave earth under the crusts of refuse left by the builders 
of Uxmal and Labna, we must find the trace of fossil man if he had 
existed in the region. Well might the sites of the known ruins ex- 
cavated to their full depth fail to reveal his presence, but here, if his 
footsteps had ever trod the peninsula, he could not escape us. 

Such, then, was the promised glimpse of a new knowledge hidden 
in a dark chamber of which we had the key, that thrilled us with ex- 
citement as we set sail for Yucatan. And this is the only considera- 
tion, perhaps, that warrants me in coming here to describe our jour- 
ney as a thing at all memorable, or different from the ordinary experi- 
ence of travelers who visit the mysterious and little-known land of 
which I shall speak. 



The People of Yucatan. 

So hurried had been our packing up and departure that we had 
hardly had time to imagine the kind of people and country that we 
were to see. We knew that there was a semi-tropical forest, and we 
imagined orchids and birds of gay plumage. We knew of the marvel- 
ous ruins hidden in thickets, where, as in the fairy tale of the " Sleep- 
ing Beauty," you cut passages with axes to see deserted palaces that 
lie concealed only a few yards away. We had been warned against 
snakes ; and to wade through the jungle, as we imagined it, we had 
taken leather leggins made nearly waist high, and I was prepared to 
invent better ones and cooler, of fine wire netting, that I thought seri- 
ously of having patented. We had heard stories of treachery, and that 
it would be unsafe to wander away alone with Indians. Hence pistols 




Fig. 2. Cave of Loltun. {Rock of Flowas.) 

Probably the most beautiful cavern in Yucatan. Situated in a forest soli- 
tude near the hacienda of Tabi. Its several spacious rotundas connected by 
dark passages are lit from above by skylights fringed with forest. Below 
colored stalactites a graceful underground vegetation charms the eye, and 
there, water, ever precious in the parched land, drips from shadowy ceilings 
into ancient dishes of stone. In the charcoal-blackened floors the sought-for 
proof of human presence was found, which, it is believed, has thrown for 
the first time the light of reasonable surety upon the antiquity and culture 
of the ancient peoples of Yucatan ; setting limits to future speculation, and 
preparing the way for a just interpretation of the grotesque ruins, the strange 
mural decorations, and the hieroglyphs, still unread, that Stephens and Waldeck 
described to astonished hearers half a century ago. The view is taken in the 
second or largest rotunda. The Indians are sitting on the edge of trench No. i, 
beyond which the dark passage on the right leads to the entrance. 



Cave Htmthig in Yitcatan. 359 

were a necessity. In the rock pools beset with bacteria we were 
warned not to bathe, much less dared we drink the water, full of fever 
germs as it was, without previously boiling it. But the first sight of 
Yucatan suggested another danger against which we had taken pre- 
• cautions in the form of a supply of quinine — namely, fever. 

The water rippled by a gentle wind looked green where we lay at 
anchor one morning, after a seven days' sail from New York, and the 
shore three miles away seemed yellow and very low. At one spot 
there were outlines of buildings, and some palm trees raised their 
graceful fronds through a stratum of vapor. ' Mr. Armour, whose yacht 
lay near, and who kindly helped us through the custom house, came 
aboard and warned us against the feverish place, Progress© by name, 
advising us to lose no time in leaving it for Merida, forty miles inland. 
His expedition had been confronted with danger and difficulty. Uxmal 
was certain malaria ; Tuloom was held by hostile Indians who had just 
murdered the Spanish governor ; members of his party had been 
driven to desperation by wood lice, and their botanist was ill. The 
prospect looked discouraging ; but once ashore, the responsibility of 
our long list of bags and boxes, the novel and reassuring look of the 
place and people, drove doubts to the dogs. 

And it was these Maya people who first and last attracted us, while, 
indeed, a great deal depended on them. If they were to be dirty, surly, 
cheating, avaricious, or treacherous, if they were to refuse us permis- 
sion to dig into the remains of their ancestors, we were at their mercy. 
But in all respects we were most agreeably disappointed with them ; 
and in the first place, I think I may say that they gave the impression 
of being the cleanest people I ever saw, my own countrymen not 
excepted. 

The white muslin that dazzled the eye in the sun seemed always 
white ; faces, often smooth-shaven in the Spanish fashion, were clean, 
and hair well brushed and cut. Where the water came from for the 
ablutions was a mystery, in a land where it was so scarce. But in this 
respect our cook. Pastor Leal, put us to shame. On sweltering days, 
after long walks through the woods when we looked and felt like re- 
pulsive vagabonds, he in his white muslin jacket was apt to present 
the appearance of a very elaborate bartender at some very luxurious 
hostelry, with a rose in his buttonhole. 

No stabbing in the back in Yucatan. No muffled figures lurking 
around corners with machetes as in other parts of Mexico and Cuba. 



360 Henry C. Mercer. 

An overseer told me, strange to relate, that when the Indians fought, 
they fought with their fists. So we put away our pistols as useless 
things, and when after weeks of experience with open doors, and with 
our rooms scattered with valuables that were never found missing but 
once, we were ready to admit the truth of Professor Heilprin's ex- 
pression, that the only thief he had met in Yucatan had come from 
Philadelphia. 

But how was this to be explained .-• Who were these people } Why 
were they so much more attractive and gentle than any one CISC'* 
Why different from the Cubans or Mexicans .'' Were they not Span- 
ish with a little Indian blood in their veins } The answer to these 
questions seemed to lie in the important fact that they were rather 
Indians with a little Spanish blood in their veins. A very few of the 
important families were pure Castilians. All the rest were mixed, and 
the darker they were, it seemed the kindlier, the cleaner, and the more 
good-natured. 

What an important fact to realize, that the Maya people, who built 
the great ruins of Central America, have not been stamped out of 
existence like our Eastern Indians. There they are still to be studied, 
and I will add, liked by any one who goes to Yucatan. Comprising 
four-fifths of the present population, they still speak one of the most 
interesting of the languages of ancient America, and the only one 
that ever was written. Like many a conquered race, they seem to be 
absorbing their conquerers. 

Their kindness smoothed our way everywhere. The Bishop of 
Yucatan, to whom we had a letter of introduction from Dr. Brinton, 
presented us to the large landed proprietor, Serlor Escalante, and he to 
Senor Duarte and to the governor. It so happened that a line of 
great plantations {haciendas) lay along the hills in our way, and we 
were to travel to and from them. Instead of camping in the forest, 
we were to sleep under their shelter, and when we found what the 
forest was on the one hand, and the haciendas on the other, we thanked 
our stars. 

Not soon shall I forget our first impression of a hacienda at Chal- 
cetok. A tram car awaited us at a wild little spot called San Ber- 
nardo, and piling our baggage upon it, a single mule whisked us at a 
run through the evening air. Across broad fields of the hemp cactus 
called Hennequin {Agave sisalensis) we rattled. Then came a smoke 
stack in the distance, then a village of thatched huts built of mud and 




Fig. 3. Meztiza Girl. 



Cave Himting in Yucatan. 361 

wattle, where at each door you saw half-naked children, figures in 
white dress, against the characteristic outline of the swinging ham- 
mock, and at last the court surrounded by graceful buildings and 
round arches supported on pillars. By these picturesque galleries 
under the palm trees, white-robed figures came and went. From a 
chapel near by a bell rang, and we heard the sing-song of children's 
voices repeating a prayer. Then the overseer received us, and going 
in, our party of five, Mr. Corwith and myself, with our secretary, assist- 
ant, and two cooks, took possession of three large bare rooms, one of 
which was a kitchen. While the hammocks were being hung on ham- 
mock pegs I walked out on the terrace and looked about. Somehow 
the scene reminded me of Egypt. The walls, the palm trees, the blue 
scarves in the twilight were oriental, but the forest seemed strange. 
I saw it beyond upon the hills, and it stretched away into the horizon, 
surrounding us with mystery, and shutting off the spot from the nine- 
teenth century and the world. Behind the hemp mill there were gar- 
dens, beautiful orange groves hanging heavy with fruit, and birds that 
sang all day. There were large water tanks and channels of masonry 
where artificial streams flowed as you see them in gardens in the 
Levant. After the coming of night and by the rise of the moon, we 
desired but little to go to bed and lose sight of a reality stranger 
than fiction. Rather might we have sat up all night imagining our- 
selves in a land of Lotus or some garden of the Arabian Nights. 

Tabi was another hacienda, and Yokat another even more beauti- 
ful, each of which we left with regret, and each of which vied with the 
other in hospitality. Sometimes villages lay near us, whither, if not 
too tired, we might walk of an evening to some public entertainment 
or a niestisa dance. In Merida we had been to an opera and seen the 
"Huguenots," where all the ladies, seated in boxes, considered it their 
duty to put on their best French dresses and sit through the perform- 
ance more or less bored to death. What a contrast was the nocturnal 
scene that confronted us in the open air at Opichen ! 

Round about us among flickering torches stood little thatched 
booths where they cooked cocoa in open fires, or made you strange 
salads and highly seasoned dishes, and where you smoked highly 
flavored cigars to the echoes of music half Spanish, half Maya, played 
on fiddles and flageolets. The strains came from a large shed open on 
the sides and full of dancers. But I must say the dance was a disap- 
pointment ; that it lacked the action, the spice that I expected. When 



362 Henry C. Mercer. 

one of the Meztiza girls so celebrated for attractiveness danced, she 
danced alone, and to our minds spoiled her appearance by putting on 
a man's hat. Several times with stiff solemnity her partner circled 
about her, and then the two separated, she going one way and he the 
other. I had heard no loud talking in Yucatan, and here, where demon- 
strative conversation seemed out of fashion, met no exception to the 
rule. No audience at a temperance lecture could have taken matters 
more seriously than did these people during the solemn intermissions. 
But at these times outside the shed the hospitality which we had met 
with everywhere was clearly shown. We appeared to be guests of the 
village, and could pay for nothing. Indians that we had never heard 
of before forced expensive cigars upon us again and again. It was no 
use to cry "Hold, enough." I went away with my pockets full of 
costly " puros " done up in lead foil. 

In our many wanderings into the woods with the Maya Indians, in 
our long diggings with them in subterranean depths where we were 
not rarely at their mercy, we found them faithful, gentle, and kind. ■ 
Incapable of handling a shovel correctly, they would pile the blades 
full of earth with their hands, strike absurd blows, and work with the 
wrong end of the pickaxe. Yet these were laughing matters. They 
were children always ; you could no more scold them than you could 
beat a delightful puppy who nibbles the corner of a favorite book. 

But a dreadful accident that overtook our party at a cave brought 
us nearer to them, perhaps, than anything else, and I doubt if any 
civilized people could have behaved with more dignity and refinement 
when confronted by sudden and tragic death. We were in a deep, 
well-like rotunda, where for hours we had been at work. Seated on a 
mossy rock I was writing my notes while the boughs of several trees 
that grew from the floor through the skylight rustled overhead. In 
their high tops two barefooted Indians who had followed us were 
climbing from bough to bough like monkeys, as with their knives they 
cut green branches for their cattle at home. Throwing these upon the 
neighboring ledge at the chasm's brink, one of the men stepped across, 
seized a pile of the twigs and began to tie them into a bundle. He 
had pulled them together,- and kneeling with his head in the leaves was 
straining with outstretched arms to bring the mass within reach of a 
string, when, pushing too hard and too far, the brink betrayed him. 
I heard a great rattle, saw the fluttering boughs, and then the figure 
in mid-air, dashed in an instant head foremost upon the cruel rocks at 



Cave Hunting in Yticatan. 363 

my feet. In a few seconds he had ceased breathing, and his comrades, 
raising him gently, felt his last heart-beats. Till all was over they 
looked solemnly on. Then one went away to appear in an hour with 
a band of friends, who, cutting boughs with their knives and tying 
them into a litter with a blanket stretched across it, laid upon it the 
body which we had meanwhile lifted from the cavern with a rope. 
Last of all one of them descended the chasm, and carving a cross upon 
the tree, scattered earth upon the fatal stains. This done we marched 
away in solemn procession to reach home at nightfall, when piteous 
wailings echoed through the village of Yokat, and we learned that the 
night which followed had witnessed a wake, a baloria differing a little 
from the weird ceremony so familiar in Ireland. 

I believe it would be so easy to become fascinated with the ruins 
of Yucatan and an investigation of its past glories, as to look with too 
great unfriendliness upon the influence brought to bear by Europeans 
upon the Indians, and for that reason I cannot agree with Stephens, 
who continually refers to the present Mayas as a lost, degraded, and 
ruined race. Our observations, I admit, were superficial, and we made 
no careful analysis of the people. But Avhen all is summed up, I im- 
agine that, living as they now live, whether rooted by a sort of vassal- 
age upon the plantations, or revolted and run wild in forests, they are 
better off in the scale of human development than when, at the head 
of aboriginal American culture, they were yet ignorant of the more 
useful metals and domestic animals, and stained with the cruelty of 
horrible human sacrifices. I would rather believe that they have a 
future, and are working it out ,by one of the most potent of all means, 
namely, blood alliance with the conquering race. 

The Forest of Yucatan. 

So much for the people ; but what of the conditions of travel in 
Yucatan t The roads, they were abominable. You jolted over bowl- 
ders, rock seams, and ledges, at a run in carts with enormously heavy, 
tired wheels, squirming in swinging boxes on mattresses of vegetable 
pollen, and tossed like dice in a dice-box. The food .? That we car- 
ried with us and cooked ourselves. Black beans ; rarely meat when a 
bull was killed ; cocoa, red wine from France, and ham from the United 
States ; rice and potatoes, sometimes delicious fruits that we had never 
tasted before, and oranges. What would we have done without them 



364 Hemy C. Mercer. 

to quench our thirst after long tramps, when we rolled bags full of 
them upon the floors of caves where there was no water ? But most 
of the danger and much of the difficulty of exploration in Yucatan are 
embodied in one fact, and that fact is the existence of the forest. I had 
expected to see a luxuriant Amazonian tangle, to stumble over the roots 
of enormous trees festooned with orchids, to feel the damp touch of suc- 
culent leaves where serpents lurked and insects swarmed, to wonder at 
the color of butterflies and parrots. Instead, Isaw a stunted, leafless 
thicket thickly tangled with thorns, not more striking in appearance 
than some dry swamp overgrown with alder and blackberry bushes in 
the United States in December. There were no large trees, no patches 
of grass, no colors ; there was no noise of insects and no superabun- 
dance of birds. Under foot lay withered leaves, dry, loose stones, and 
ledges of yellow rock. 

In this wilderness the traveler loses his way. Fever attacks him. 
The explorer, devoured with wood-lice, fails of heart. And where are 
you going to dig, among the stones, dead leaves and briers .? In certain 
places where the thin, red soil has collected lie haciendas with fields of 
hemp, sugar cane, or maize. But elsewhere from Chiapas to Belize, 
from the Gulf on the north to the Cordil-dil-lieras on the southwest, 
this tangled, thirsty thicket covers everything. Revolted Indians hid- 
ing away in it, and using it as a bulwark against their enemies, hold 
their own in its depths. I do not believe the rumors of temples and 
cities still flourishing in it unknown to white men, but I am sure that 
Maler has found many structures buried in its recesses that escaped 
Stephens, Waldeck, and Charnay, and that no one ever heard of be- 
fore, though those known to us, like Uxmal, Labna, and Chichenitza, 
are wonderful enough. 

Not yet, owing to the difficulty of digging in the stOnes and briers, 
or of cutting down the thicket, and building scaffolds so as to even see 
or photograph them, have they been adequately excavated or studied. 
And there they stand, rapidly vanishing, it must be said, because of 
their imperfect construction. And because their walls rest on no true 
arches, because the joints are not bound nor the stones squared, and 
because the facing is not linked to the heart, they crumble to pieces 
more rapidly than the ancient buildings of Egypt and Assyria, Rome 
and Greece. 

Some are easy to reach. You might sail from New York and see 
Uxmal in ten days, but I am half glad that stories of fever and snakes, 




Fig. 4. View from the Dwarf's House at Uxmal. 



Cave Hunting in Yucatan. 365 

heat and thirst, have frightened away the horde of tourists who, rush- 
ing in, would rob the region of its unconscious charm. So let the 
ruins remain in solitude. Let them disappear in silence surrounded 
by all the mystery of the forest. 

At Uxmal these marvelous structures are set on high mounds and 
platforms that look like natural hills as you catch glimpses of them 
from the distant sierra. The so-called House of the Dwarf stands 
upon the highest mound of all, and you climb to it on a stone face by 
narrow and steep steps, where a fall would be no less sure death than 
a slip on the sides of the great Pyramid at Gizeh. The wind blew 
fiercely when we stood there for the first time, and fortunately for us, 
heavy clouds drifted across the sky, darkening the strange walls below 
us, that rose out of the thicket. The wilderness stretched away to 
the hills. As we had seen it often before from the sierra, it had as- 
sumed again that day its tint of deceitful blue. It seemed as if there 
were cool places where rivers flowed, and where the cloud shadows fell 
upon it, pleasant lawns and high trees. But these mirage-like allure- 
ments were the false wiles of the ever-present forest, here as parched, 
shadeless, and thirsty as ever. 

In the tangle of thorns below, all sign of communication between 
building and building, all traces of smaller dwellings, of aqueducts or 
roads, seemed to be lost. But who had yet had the strength or cour- 
age to search for these things in this most feverish of places, where 
at one time even the cattle died ; where I was told that Indians did 
not survive two generations .'' Hard enough was it to penetrate the 
curtain of briers and mantle of rubbish about the sides and walls of 
the great buildings, as Charnay and LePlongeon had done, so as even 
to photograph or study them. The House of Turtles, the Casa-del- 
Gubernador, the Nunnery ; what significance had these names invented 
by the Spaniard, as we walked through a false arch into an immense 
courtyard, and saw walls on every side covered with a symbolism in 
stone that antedated the coming of the European .? Monstrous masks, 
projections like the trunks of elephants, grotesque tongues, great eyes, 
rows of teeth, rising suns, phallic signs, and above all the great rattle- 
snake with plumed human head-dress confronted us with a meaning 
that was lost. It came upon the mind in a sense of something ma- 
levolent ; something symbolic of horrible and bloody themes of sac- 
rifice ; of torture and awful ceremony in the native manuscripts. It 
seemed to rise from the forest and haunt the memory of our journey in 



366 Henry C. Mercer. 

the wilds. Were we in the nineteenth century ? Were we looking at 
things that had existed, or were we wandering in a land of dreams ? In 
these strange impressions, never known before, we felt the fascination 
of ancient America so potent to encompass the searcher in the tierra 
caliente and lead him astray. So often had it betrayed him with 
strange fancies, that counting up the names of well-known explorers 
who have become disturbed or distressed in this study, which I pray 
you to excuse me from doing here, the French have invented a phrase 
of sinister meaning when they say : Toutes Ics Americanistes deva7it 
foHs. All the students of ancient America go mad. 

Caves. 

But what of the caves which had occupied our thoughts continu- 
ously from the first .-* Did we succeed in exploring them, or the chief 
group of them that lay scattered among and between the ruined cities "^ 
Were they what we expected, and did they contain the evidence we" 
sought .? In answer to which questions let me say that our first look 
at the caves brought disappointment. Instead of being what I had 
expected to find them, they were unlike any caves I had ever seen 
before. Caves that contain the remains of men or animals in the 
United States or Europe generally open into the sides of cliffs or 
escarpments of rock. But these yawned down into the ground like 
wells, sloping inward like the sides of an ink-bottle. The fact was, 
there were no cliffs in Yucatan. No rivers had cut across beds of 
rock, thus laying bare caves in cross section. But erosion had pro- 
ceeded directly downward till holes opened in the cave ceiling. Some- 
times piles of stones had fallen into these skylights, almost reaching 
their overhanging edge. Often trees grew up to their brink. But' 
you generally had to climb down on rude sapling ladders made by 
Indians, on trees or by ropes, and so difficult was it to get into many 
of these caverns, that they would have been ruled out of an explorer's 
consideration in other countries. Savage peoples preferring more ac- 
cessible shelters would have avoided them, and so doubtful was it that 
many of them would contain all or any considerable part of the evi- 
dence we sought, that it seemed as though our expedition had already 
failed ; as if, as far as cave hunting was concerned, we had come to 
Yucatan in vain. And for a time the prospect was discouraging in the 
extreme, until an overlooked consideration restored the caves to all 



Cave Himting m Yucatan. 367 

their importance. It was the consideration embodied in the word 
agna, water, one of the first and last words a traveler hears in Yucatan. 
Broadly speaking, the peninsula is waterless. A few exceptions con- 
front us in the muddy, stagnant pools called aguadas, and a few stony 
channels on the northeast coast only active in the rainy season. But 
with these allowed for, there are no streams, springs, or lakes in the 
region. To get water you must go under ground for it. You must 
bore wells, or find it in caves where it drops from the roof. The 
ancient Mayas lived on rain water collected in the rainy seasons, and 
stored in cemented cisterns which now form one of the most impor- 
tant features of the ruins. But what did they do before the cisterns 
were built, before they had established themselves in the region and 
constructed the cities .'' The important answer to this question is, that 
the caves supply water, and that since the early immigrants could not 
bore wells in regions where there were no aguadas, they must needs 
have ransacked the caves for water or perished. And the evidence 
soon showed that from the time of their first coming they had entered 
the caves by ladders when necessary, and halted for a while near the 
refreshing pools or dripping stalactites. 

So after all, the whole story of man's life in Yucatan was in our 
hands and lay buried in the caves. The lowest film of trodden earth, 
of charcoal, ashes, and pottery, marked the advent of the first comer, 
the uppermost that of the last, and when once we realized this, our 
work flourished. But the trouble of it was to get the right cave — a 
cave where the floor rubbish had not become mixed by sliding, where 
great blocks had not fallen from the ceiling to obstruct work, where 
we could dig to the living rock at the bottom without blasting or im- 
possible expense ; and at last we found it. 

At a wild place in the hills called Oxkintok in the midst of a group 
of little known ruins, not half a mile from a stone mound that con- 
tained a complex series of passages described as a labyrinth, within 
walking distance of our headquarters at Senor Escalante's hacienda 
of Chalcetok, Mr. Corwith chanced upon a cave, which when we came 
to examine it promised to answer all our expectations. 

Like all the other caves it was entered through an orifice or sky 
window. But the fallen rocks had so choked the entrance that ingress 
was easy. And one of the chief desiderata for the exploration of all 
caves was fulfilled when we found that even then in the midst of the 
dry season it dripped water, and that ancient stone dishes hollowed 



368 Henry C. Mercer. 

from blocks of limestone lay about the floor or stood full of water un- 
der the stalactites. More than this, at the base of the skylight which' 
lit the chamberat its farther end, lay a heap of stones which proved to 
consist largely of dressed blocks, chips, and partly worked water dishes 
left there by the ancient builders of the ruins, who were thus shown 
at the first glance to have come to the cave not only to get water, but 
to get stone. A few small crannies leading away from the spacious 
room had been walled up by the Indians as blinds for shooting doves. 
But it was the only room, and its smooth earthen floor presented the 
only place to dig. As sure as it was that the people of the surround- 
ing ruins had visited this place to get water, so sure was it that proof 
of their presence in the form of layers of ashes, charcoal, and pot- 
sherds, of chips of stone or implements of bone, together with the 
remains of contemporary animals, lay under foot. No rocks obstructed 
us, and there was no chance for land sliding or disturbance. Directly 
in the middle of the chamber in the dim light of the roof window, 
we had found the place to settle the question of man's antiquity in 
Yucatan. 

It was not light enough where we stood to blow out the candles by 
whose aid we had come stumbling onward for some distance through 
the darkness and over loose rocks. The Indians took off their san- 
dals and set down the shovels and pickaxes, and the large round bas- 
kets supported by straps across their foreheads. We spread their 
contents — specimen bags, tape measures, monocular level, India-ink 
and pens — upon the ground, and then marked with trowels a rec- 
tangle to include the area of our trench, about 20 feet long by 4 broad 
across the middle of the cave floor. 

No common curiosity, no desire to unearth beautiful vases, figure- 
ines of jade, or ornaments of obsidian, inspired us as the Indians be- 
gan to dig. All these things lay above ground and around us in the 
mounds and cisterns, and in the rubbish near the ruins. We were 
hunting for a few broken potsherds and bones. But they were to 
tell us more than all the rest. They would answer the unanswered 
question, how long had man lived in Yucatan } — a question which 
here in the heart of prehistoric America we proposed to test for the 
first time, by searching for the earliest footprints of humanity in the 
earth beneath our feet. 

We held the candles downward as the Indians turned up the lumps 
of earth with the pickaxes, and saw the ground caked thick with pot- 



Cave Hunting in Yucatan. 369 

sherds and the bones of the deer. When we had dug a great hole 2 
feet deep, we had passed a surface layer of human rubbish which we 
studied well, to find under it a band of comparatively undisturbed 
earth. When we had gone 5 feet another subdivision of the rubbish 
layer was plainly visible, some 1 5 inches thick, lying still deeper. The 
discolored earth was full of broken potsherds of various colors and 
makes, and intermixed with the bones of still existing animals, while 
in it and below the surface we found no trace of the Spaniard. 
Very certainly we were working among the leavings of the builders of 
the ruins, but we soon left the rubbish behind us and dug downward 
into the unknown. The earth was red and comparatively soft. The 
pit grew to the depth of 7, 10, and 12 feet. Days passed as we toiled 
on. At each new digging we clambered down to go over the bottom 
inch by inch with trowels and candles. We built props against the 
side so as to scrutinize them in the gloom for traces of layers. The 
small snail shells and bat bones continued, but the charcoal and ashes 
had stopped, and with them all traces of man. What would come 
next .'' 

How shall I describe the intervals when I walked about the cavern 
as the work went on ; while I looked at the colors of the tinted sta- 
lactites overhead ; while the weird rustling of the banana trees that 
rose from the cave floor through the skylight, and beat the crusts with 
their boughs, filled the cave with echoes, or slanting sun gleams fell 
upon our heap of oranges till they glowed in the twilight like tongues 
of flame. The fact that we were upon the track of a new knowledge 
inspired us. If man were to intervene between us and the living rock, 
he was the predecessor by a long interval of the ruin builder ; perhaps 
a stone chipper ignorant of the art of polishing stone, perhaps an 
undeveloped or ape-like savage who struggled for existence with the 
megatherium, the fossil bear, or the formidable saber-toothed tiger of 
Port Kennedy. 

Smeared with clay, weary, full of misgivings of the caving in of 
the trench or some unexpected obstruction, we toiled on by candle- 
light ; the more thrilled with excitement the deeper we dug, until at 
last all anxiety ended when the pickaxe clanged on solid rock. We 
were done. It was over. We had penetrated for the first time this 
region of discovery to its uttermost limit, and had found, in the thick 
red interval below the culture layers of the surface, nothing but bats, 
snails, and rabbits. Here, where the primitive savage must have left 



370 Henry C. Mercer. 

his sign if he existed, there was no primitive savage, no trace of 
humanity. The human evidence began and ended with the layers 
above. They stood for the builders of the ruins — a people who, judged 
by the potsherds of the layer, had arrived equipjDcd with the art of 
making pottery, who had not, therefore, developed their culture in 
Yucatan, but had brought it with them from somewhere else. They 
represented an invasion of the peninsula fairly in accord with the 
Maya annals — something about a thousand or fifteen hundred years 
old ; modern as compared with humanity in Europe, that was all. It 
had been suspected, but we had presented direct evidence on the sub- 
ject for the first time. 

This, then, was the testimony of the cave at Oxkintok. Let it 
stand for all the twenty-nine caves explored ; since all, one after an- 
other, expressed the same fact more or less clearly as they were more 
or less fit for' excavation. For the reasons stated in my book, "The 
Hill Caves of Yucatan," ^ we were satisfied ; with this proof in our hands 
the work was done. Defeat would have been to fail to find caves 
favorable for excavation. But we had found them. We had been 
eminently successful ; and though to make assurance doubly sure we 
pushed on, and continued to examine caves that always repeated and 
never contradicted what we had already learned, the work had lost its 
zest. What remained were glimpses of rare and wondrous beauty that 
rewarded us at these places ; such a sight as we saw at Actun Xpukil 
(cave of mice), where rotunda after rotunda, lit from above and over- 
grown with banana groves, opened downward by what seemed subter- 
ranean valleys and mountains ; as at Xabaka (cave of the coal-black 
water), where the dark pool lay in the gloom of an immense chamber 
reached by a chasm overhung with trees and ferns, and yawning from 
several sunny little recesses haunted by bees ; like Xkokikan (the cave 
of serpents), where Indians told of intertwined masses of snakes writh- 
ing at the bottom of a gulf ; or like Actun Benado, where the tinted 
walls of an immense rotunda, lit from above, rose about you like the 
complex vaultings of a gothic cathedral on whose walls Indians had 
carved the figures of animals. 

But of all the fair sights of Yucatan, fairest of all and last to be 
foro-otten, is beautiful Loltun. Rock of flowers indeed ! where, like the 



'The Hill Caves of Yucatan; or, A Search for Evidence of Man's Antiquity in the Cav- 
erns of Central America. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1896. 




Fig. 5. Actun Xpukil. {Cave of Mice.) 

Actun Xpukil (Cave of Mir A is in the mountains, two miles west of the 
hacietida of Chalcetok, Yucatan, and four miles from the ruined city of Oxkin- 
tok ; one of the largest and most beautiful caverns in Yucatan, containing fifty- 
nine stone water- dishes and many relics of the builders of the neighboring 
ruins. View from the first rotunda into the second rotunda, showing the effect 
of the skylight upon vegetation underground. Palm trees flourish in the cooler 
air. Alamo roots reach the cave floor from the brink of the skylight eighty 
to one hundred feet above. 



/ 




Fig. 6. Skylight in the Water Cave of Oxkintok. 

The banana trees are growing on a heap of fallen limestone fragments, 
many of which have been hollowed for water- dishes or mortars, or dressed 
square for wall building by the makers of the neighboring ruins. No trace of 
the tools was discovered. 



Cave Hunting in Yucatan. 3/1 

enchanted garden that Aladdin saw, doomed to vanish at an ill-chosen 
word, groves rustled under ground, and by the quiet light of the sky 
windows fringed with forest, it seemed always afternoon. A bluish 
reflection made the air appear like liquid. By the great vaults where 
cool drops fell, we seemed to be walking under the sea at places where 
enormous fish, not stranger in shape than the stalagmites, might swim 
from labyrinths of coral. Here we were neither in the heavens above, 
or on the earth beneath, but by the waters under the earth ; and the 
airs that drew cool through the underground gardens were one of the 
delights of Paradise upon those scorching days. 

When the cavern had yielded its secret after ten days of toil, as 
we were about to say farewell to it for the last time, its superhuman 
beauty came irresistibly upon us. Then the great chasms and gal- 
leries leading into an unknown blackness had lost their terror. Then 
stalagmites, ""that rose in forms of men and beasts from the floor, 
seem'^ed to wear gentle smiles. In the pleasant air the birds chirped 
alluringly from about the skylights, while from under the blue arches 
seemed to come a rustle of leaves that repeated the whisper — here is 
rest. A vague regret, a confusion of motives stirred us. We felt the 
power of an^'enchantment potent to beguile us, like the lotus eaters, to 

forget the way home. 

We have been told that our expedition was a failure because we 
did not contrive to bring back a store of vases painted with hiero- 
glyphs, remarkable objects of jade, blades of obsidian, or even manu- 
scripts. Forgive us if we did not return laden with these things, 
if, in the fir'It place, we did not go to Yucatan to find them. 
Neither did we go there to find fossil man, but the truth. To defend 
our work from the charge of failure is to say that we have cited for the 
first time the evidence of caves to set a limit to the speculations^ of 
arch^ologists in Yucatan; that by a newly applied test of ■ much im- 
portance we have fixed a reasonable antiquity for the ruins and the 
builders of the ruins, and that by proof rather than guesswork we 
have shown that the culture of the Mayas was not developed in Yuca- 
tan, but brought from abroad. 

As far as the geological antiquity of the human race is concerned, 
shall we not infer that Yucatan, that center of archaeological interest, 
has been fairly eliminated from the field of search, and. that from our 
labor it may be concluded, not unjustly, that if you would find fossil 
man you must look for him elsewhere? 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 






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